What do you see when you look at an aerial photograph?

If you haven't looked at an aerial photograph, you might be surprised what you can and can't see. You can easily see roads, geographic features such as shores, mountains, the larger rivers, lakes, landslides, faultlines, etc. Creeks and smaller rivers can be obscured by the trees that often grow along them. Depending on the scale, you may be able to see parks, individual buildings, and similar-sized objects in the landscape. A serials of aerials of the same area can show you urban growth or the loss/increase in farming or changes in the road structure. What you usually can't see with aerials are small landscape features such as details on fences, yards, buildings, or a property's berms. In addition, your area of interest may not have been in the path of any of the flights we have.

See Geographic Index pages for information on the flights we own and the areas they cover.

See our examples of the different formats and scales you can see in our aerials.

Aerial Photograph Formats

Aerials also come in three basic types: black & white, color, and color-infrared. Black & white shows good contrast and detail. We have B&W photos dating back to 1928. Beginners often like the color photos, because it is sometimes easier for them to identify familiar objects using the color. Our earliest color photos are from 1973. Color-infrared can show landscape features that otherwise aren't very clear, but they present these features in "false" (that is, unfamiliar) colors.

What is scale?

Scale on an aerial photograph is the ratio between the size of the object in the photo compared to the size of the object that was photographed. We indicate these by notation: 1:4200, 1:7200, 1:28,000, and so on. The smaller the number after the colon, the closer to the ground the picture was taken. These can be roughly translated into feet and inches. For instance, 1:4200 means that 1 inch on the photograph equals 350 feet on the ground (350 X 12 = 4200); 1:7200 means that 1 inch on the photograph equals 600 feet on the ground (600 X 12).